Update/Related: Phil Torrone at MAKE points us to an open source blimp kit created by tinkerer/artist Jed Berk. The kit is available for purchase on MAKE's website. Chris Anderson mentions Berk's kit in his project post at DIY Drones, and Anderson's project began with modding Jedâ€™s blimp (it's open source and made to be hacked). In the end, looks like Chris didnâ€™t end up actually using any elements from Berk's kit for the finished product, except for some plastic strips that hold the motors. All other components were built from scratch. The point? Open source sharing means like-minded tinkerers can riff, improvise, and inspire one another toward to new forms of innovation. Whether you're talking blimps or software, that's generally a very good thing.

In case it’s not obvious, the sub-$100 blimps (and indeed the sub-$1,000 version) are only appropriate for indoors. Outdoors you need much larger, more expensive blimps with more powerful thrusters to fight wind.

For outdoors, we used fixed-wing UAVs, which are all described at DIY Drones

I’m curious whether there’s an application for these in scrubbing industrial pollutants out of the atmosphere, or maybe cloudseeding/busting, depending on a region’s need or surplus of precipitation. But as long as we’re thinking ecologically, what might be the impact of swarms of these puppies deflating randomly? If the mass helium balloon launches of my youth were done away with due to risks to wildlife, et al, what’s different here?

In terms of UAVs built and operated by the general populace, here’s a concept for someone else to implement:

Include a powerful/sensitive 802.11b/g card and antenna. High in the sky picking up open wireless access points should be quite easy. (Assuming the solar power for such a project is feasible.) Then have it take photos — wherever the wind takes it — and upload those photos to some reconfigured server such as the Internet Archive or USENET or Flickr. You don’t have to tell it where to go so much as watch where it has been, but bonus points if you include a GPS receiver to embed its coordinates into the EXIF data of the JPEGs that are sent out. Theoretically you could even have it do software/command updates every time it syncs up with the Internet.

Then if people launched thousands of these collectively (i.e. a swarm), you’d really have some interesting data sets.